Technical Debt in Test Automation

Automated test execution is one of the more popular and available strategies to minimize the cost for software testing, and is also becoming one of the central concepts in modern software development as methods such as test-driven development gain popularity. Published studies on test automation indicate that the maintenance and development of test automation tools commonly encounter problems due to unforeseen issues. To further investigate this, we performed a case study on a telecommunication subsystem to seek factors that contribute to inefficiencies in use, maintenance, and development of the automated testing performed within the scope of responsibility of a software design team. A qualitative evaluation of the findings indicates that the main areas of improvement in this case are in the fields of interaction design and general software design principles, as applied to test execution system development.